programming

Sent from my Mini iPad.

(Follow up to my original non-sequitur.)

Jason Fried's talk at Big Omaha 2009: interruptions are bad, don't talk to each other.

def adder(x):    return lambda y: x + y add5 = adder(5)add5(1)6

I got FIOS installed at home a couple of months ago (awesome, by the way), and with it, I got a new router. I happened to see the admin screen for the router and it looked like it was much better than the one from my previous Westell.

So, I decided to try setting up the web server again this past Sunday.  It was a great way to procrastinate from doing actual work.  After re-familiarizing myself with my setup (which I hadn’t touched in a while) and doing a quick review of the original nettuts article, I got Apache going, and I got ssh going from inside my home network.  Next was the part where I crashed and burned last time: opening it up to the outside world and accessing it from there.

First, the router.  My current router has a much more user-friendly interface, and I’m happy to say that this made things a lot easier.  I didn’t dive into it too deeply last time (being too busy with the gelato project), but I had heard that my old router wasn’t too easy to configure.  This time, it was a piece of cake to funnel a port request from outside into my server.  I opened up port 80 for HTTP and port 22 for ssh, then tested it with my iPhone with wifi disabled and everything worked fine.

After that, the firewall was a little bit more trouble.  I still couldn’t get Shorewall to do what I wanted it to do.  Somehow, turning it on prevented all access from the outside.  I tried a couple of alternatives that the Shorewall documentation suggested for simpler setups, but couldn’t get those to work either.  Finally, i just studied up a bit on iptables (a great tutorial on Just Linux) to see if I could configure it manually.  That did the trick.  I set up two simple rules: the first rule to accept ssh from port 22, and another rule to deny everything but HTTP from port 80.

Anyway, now I’ve got a web server that serves up my initials if you access it.  I can also log in to my computer at home while I’m away.  Yippee.  Not really sure what I’m going to do with it now, haha.

Well, I missed the first milestone I set for myself by about a week.  Those darn robots at work have had me running around at work making sure the system stays up and orders get shipped. Anyway, it looks like thing have finally slowed down to a manageable pace, so I'll have more time to get some icecream work done.  The more I think about this, the more it seems like I've got a good thing going.  I can't wait to get a decent version up and running so I can get additional feedback from more people. Things I've picked up since the last post:

• notes on Facebook Connect integration
• recursive relations in my model setups

Project icecream is coming along pretty well.  I did my first proof-of-concept demo to someone and she thought I had something good.  My next target date is Memorial Day weekend when I plan on demo-ing icecream to another, bigger, group of friends.  After that, I'm shooting for  Fourth-of-July closed beta test with a target demographic.  I'm pretty stoked. As for Ruby and Rails, I'm just going to skip it for now.  I'm finding everything I need so far with Django.  The biggest potential issue I had was with user authentication and registration, but I've found some good resources for setting it up so that I don't need to re-invent everything.  (James Bennett's b-list blog is particularly helpful.  I will likely use his Django registration package, kept in bitbucket.)  And all practical considerations aside, the recent Ruby-Porngate drama just makes me glad I went the Python route. Speaking of community resources, it's obvious that I am racking up quite a debt to the open source community in general and to the Django community in particular.  I plan on contributing back to these as soon as I have my product up and running.

I found this great article on Rails vs. Django the other day (via HN, I think).  I wish I had found it a month ago.  Oh well, I guess I'll take a look at Ruby in more depth now.

In trying to decide which language to use for my new project (it's still secret, so I'll just call it Project Ice Cream for now), I tried googling the question.  Of course, everything I found just left me more unsure.  This probably means that choosing between the two won't make much of a difference, but I decided to go in-house and ask my brother-in-law for advice.  Granted, he's not prejudiced at all working for Google, but I decided to go with Python.  So...no Rails and I guess I'm going with the Django framework (his recommendation too).